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Article Dans Une Revue SEDERI Année : 2019

The limner's art in Shakespeare's Macbeth

Résumé

For all its Protestant mistrust of images, Elizabethan and Jacobean England was fascinated by the visual arts and, as Horst Bredekamp puts it, paradoxically "reinforce[d] what it reject[ed]" (2015, 169). While continental treatises like Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo's A tracte containing the artes of curious paintinge caruinge buildinge, translated by Richard Haydock in 1598, "introduced the English-reading public to the theory of linear perspective" (Elam 2017, 9), the first original texts in English on the arts of drawing and painting began to circulate in print. A man of his time, Shakespeare could hardly ignore these new discourses on pictures, as his frequent and expert use of iconographic references and technical terms testifies (ibid., 10). It is with this context in mind that I intend to reassess the style and aesthetics of Macbeth in connection with early modern pictorial techniques. "[W]hy do I yield to that suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair [?]" (1.3.136-37, my emphasis), 1 Macbeth wonders after he has heard the predictions of the witches. Ghastly, albeit sophisticated, visual images abound in Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy. Overwhelmed by the evil forces that they have unleashed and that are now crushing them, the Macbeths are ironically reduced to miniatures in the last act of the play. As the plot thickens, they are indeed gradually downsized and seem hopelessly dwarfed in the end: "Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief" (5.2.20-22), Angus says of the titular character. How then should we understand the idea of "miniature" in the early modern period? The word was first used by Edward Norgate in connection with "limning" in a treatise written around 1627, Miniatura or the art of limning. Yet, limning originally referred to a technique rather than to a small size painting and it designated "the cleanly, discreet art of watercolour" (Coombs 2009, 78), an art that took up "neither undue space nor time" (ibid.). Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century painters could rely on a number of treatises to improve their practice. In
Macbeth is a graphic work whose visual rhetoric mirrors the outside atmosphere of the Scottish heath and the inner psyche of the titular characters. This article explores the early modern visual praxis in Macbeth in connection with the art of limning to show that, against a dark background symbolizing evil, the playwright uses golden and gaudy hues as a mirror reflecting Macbeth's perturbed mind. Eventually, the colour spots in the play are "diapered over" by the white fog of the Scottish heath. Shakespeare thus resorts to specific colour codes in order to create a visual symphony where "foul" becomes "fair."
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hal-02362253 , version 1 (15-11-2019)

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Sophie Chiari. The limner's art in Shakespeare's Macbeth. SEDERI , 2019, 29, ⟨10.34136/sederi.2019.3⟩. ⟨hal-02362253⟩
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